Quote

I left science, then I went into art, but I approach things very analytically. I choose to pursue both art and architecture as completely separate fields rather than merging them.

Maya Lin

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Maya Lin
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 5
Architect
Designer
Land Artist
Landscape Architect
Printmaker
Sculptor
Athens
Ohio
Maya Ying Lin
Things
Approach
Choose
Analytically
Went
Merging
Rather
Separate
Science
Architecture
Artist
Pursue
Left
Fields
Art
Completely

More quotes by Maya Lin

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When I was very little, we would get letters from China, in Chinese, and they' be censored. We were a very insular little family.
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Sometimes you have to stop thinking. Sometimes you shut down completely. I think that's true in any creative field.
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You have to let the viewers come away with their own conclusions. If you dictate what they should think, you've lost it.
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To fly, we have to have resistance. It's all about turbulence. Reacting to images of wave patterns in fluid motion.
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My goal is to strip things down so that you need just the right amount of words or shape to convey what you need to convey. I like editing. I like it very tight.
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When I was building the Vietnam Memorial, I never once asked the veterans what it was like in the war, because from my point of view, you don't pry into other people's business.
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My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions.
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The role of art in society differs for every artist.
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If we forget what used to be, then we’ve lost an ability to really be sensitive to our surroundings.
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Some of your teachers are actually closer in age to you than you think.
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I'm as much interested in the form-making as well as getting you to think about what we're doing to the world around us.
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I started studying what the nature of a monument is and what a monument should be. And for the World War III memorial I designed a futile, almost terrifying passage that ends nowhere.
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I though about what death is, what a loss is. A sharp pain that lessens with time, but can never quite heal over. A scar. The idea occurred to me there on the site. Take a knife and cut open the earth, and with time the grass would heal it. As if you cut open the rock and polished it.
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Math, it's a puzzle to me. I love figuring out puzzles.
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To fly, we must have resistance.
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If you don't remember history accurately, how can you learn?
Maya Lin
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A lot of my works deal with a passage, which is about time. I don't see anything that I do as a static object in space. It has to exist as a journey in time.
Maya Lin
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I begin by imagining an artwork verbally. I try to describe in writing what the project is, what it is trying to do. I need to understand the artwork without giving it a specific materiality or solid form.
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The definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost.
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I deliberately did not read anything about the Vietnam War because I felt the politics of the war eclipsed what happened to the veterans. The politics were irrelevant to what this memorial was.
Maya Lin